Earlier this year, our newsroom to a live Skype shot to air. With the help of a MacBook Pro and a high quality camera, the video was really close to broadcast quality...but it still relied on thousands of dollars in camera and computer equipment.
Sometimes, though, broadcast quality isn't as important as live...and viewers are OK with lower quality video if there's a good reason for the lower quality. Look at the VTech camera phone video - the quality wasn't great, but because of the significance of the tape it didn't matter. Think of all the crazy surveillance tape you see on television...tape that conveys immediacy or tells a story is more important than perfect quality.
That's where UStream comes in...UStream allows regular people to stream live video from mobile devices. They even have a free application to stream video from the iPhone. Sometimes, though, your field crews don't have an iPhone or they don't have the opportunity to configure an account just to cover breaking news. That's where the recently released Cerevo cam stands out.
Cerevo Cam is a Japanese product that allows to stream video to UStream with just a couple quick button strokes. I recently had the opportunity to play with and configure one of these cameras.
It wasn't an easy process - the thing only exists in Japan, and though the menus on the camera itself can be displayed in English (after some blind tinkering with options) it has to be configured using the Japanese-only website. (Big thanks to Google Translate for help on this...obviously).
Once you enter the information for the Wi-Fi network you're currently using, the website creates a QR code. By taking a picture of the QR code, the camera configures itself to automatically submit pictures to the Cerevo website...and with a little more configuration you can have the thing feed directly to the UStream website.
Though I appreciate the simplicity designed into the camera (once configured) it seems a little unnecessary. The iPhone 3Gs and iPhone 4 have the capability to transmit video to the UStream website, and it doesn't require extra hardware. In addition, the Cerevo camera doesn't work unless there's a Wi-Fi hotspot, so to use these in the field we need to deploy them with a mobile Wi-Fi hotspot.
We still use live trucks...but who knows how much longer that could last. Incremental developments like UStream, Cerevo Cam, Streambox and the Livestream livepack are all slowly pushing us to a day where the cost for full HD streaming live transmission drops through the basement.
